David McCandless has the rare ability to make sense out of our world with words and images.

As a data journalist and information designer with a killer sense of humor ("My pet-hate is pie charts. Love pie. Hate pie-charts"), his talk at Social Commerce Summit Europe was a hit. We wanted more, so we put the following interview together. Enjoy!

This seems like a straightforward question, but it’s proven to be a difficult one to answer. Even visualization researchers don’t have a clear definition.

Is it synonymous with information graphics? Does visualization have to be computer generated? Does data have to be involved, or can it be abstract? The answers vary depending on who you ask.

Visualization is a medium. It’s not just an analysis tool nor just a way to prove a point more clearly through data.

Visualization is like books. There are different writing styles and categories, there are textbooks and there are novels, and they communicate ideas in different ways for varied purposes. And just like authors who use words to communicate, there are rules that you should always follow and others that are guidelines that you can bend and break...

Turkish-Property-World.com is a single source of free information about Turkey, the regions the Turkey property market, legal issues and helpful advice on the best way to secure your dream home. We offer holiday villas and luxury apartments, real estate investment properties for sale in Belek Side Alanya Antalya Kemer Kas Kalkan Fethiye the world famous turkish riviera. http://www.turkish-property-world.com

The SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT has developed a new tool with Ericsson to better understand human behavior. "ManyCities" is a new website that "explores the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity in cities across the world," including London, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Taking complex data and organizing it in a intuitive way, the application allows users to quickly visualize patterns of human movement within the urban context down to the neighborhood scale. You can imagine how useful a tool like this can be for urban planners or even daily commuters, especially once real time analytics come into play.

Good data visualization helps us see the meaning in data, hence it has always been an important tool. Today computers crunch numbers and design programs help us visualize data in many ways, from infographics to interactives. But in a time before those tools, designers were creating truly beautiful work that should be an inspiration to anyone working today.

These maps are pulled from the 1870 edition of the Statistical Atlas of the United States, visualizing data from the 1870 census. Each cover a different aspect of the rapidly changing America. While the book is full of detailed visualizations, these maps are particularly notable. The choice of visual presentation and vibrant color palettes make them enticing (and a little surprising) seeing as they’re from the staunch Victorian era.

These just prove that no matter how tedious the subject, you can always inject a little creativity.

Cartograms are fun tools for swapping out land area for some other variable. For certain figures, especially data that swing wildly at one of the end of the spectrum or another, cartograms are ideal.

This cartogram, which compares property values between counties across the continental United States, looks like bad news from a gastroenterologist. What this in fact shows is that just a handful of counties account for the vast majority of property values in the U.S. The distortion is so severe that it doesn’t look like a map of the U.S. at all...

London-based designer Michael Pecirno creates minimalist maps in an ongoing project to understand the landscape of the world. His work is exploratory, using a decidedly narrow set of data to see the unique patterns it creates across the land. In each case, the map is drawn with data points, leaving traditional physical and political borders to our imagination.

Each map visualizes the lower 48 states of the US, using a wealth of information from the USDA to detail specific features like urbanization, fields planted with corn, the spread of grasslands, or bodies of water. The map reveals a new and insightful view of America’s composition.

The show explores Roman infrastructure and ingenuity, all below ground level. We journeyed via the icy, crystal clear waters of subterranean aqueducts that feed the Trevi fountain and two thousand year old sewers which still function beneath the Roman Forum today, to decadent, labyrinthine catacombs. Our laser scans map these hidden treasures, revealing for the first time the complex network of tunnels, chambers and passageways without which Rome could not have survived as a city of a million people.

Topography, architecture and traffic routes give every city a unique structure.'These conditions create the typical and individual inner structure of a city.I didn’t only want to show these structures in the conventional way from above, but also including the exact three-dimensionality of topography and buildings – a real world visualisation.The OpenStreetMap data enabled me to visualize the satellite-based information using DEM Earth in Cinema 4D. The results are some extraordinary views of large capitals and small towns.'

I think this article is awesome because they use data visualization to show what people share the most, visit the most, and search the most. Data is everywhere and people are using it everyday and sometimes don't even think about it.

Logo design company Designmantic has put together 14 principles of using text in design. Titled ‘Touchstones To Get The Text Right’, the guidelines include paying attention to font size and creating an ideal line length...

A look at infographics that brilliantly display data using physical objects, a technique that can simplify information.Visit the original list by Freeyork for more, including a pie chart made from actual thanksgiving pies, information about water usage and fast food visualized with handmade paper objects and stacks of sugar cubes depicting the amount of sugar in food and drinks, among others.

Viewed together, these colorful and impressionistic maps depict the organic, evolving nature of the urban landscape.

Charles Labanowski creates hundreds of stylized city maps, and the 483 maps he's put together so far are both an accurate reflection of the actual topography of places and impressionistic in what they depict.

Maps are at the intersection of so many interesting things," he says. "For one, they are a beautiful combination of organic and unplanned, and inorganic and planned growth—sort of a constantly evolving, living history. They can also be emotionally evocative—whether it’s reminding you of some past experience or inspiring a desire to travel and explore a new place."

Emily Garfield like to say that she grows cities. With pen, ink, and watercolor, the Boston-based artist creates maps of imaginary places that tap into the essence of urban form.

Garfield has long been interested by the presentation of architecture in visual art. The inviting, surrealist arcades and sidewalks of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico inspired Garfield to begin producing her own street-level dreamscapes as an art student at Brown University.

But it was when she created her first aerial view of a fantasy city—an abstract web of streets, bridges, and blocks—that she got a particularly positive response from other people. Even without any text, Garfield's drawings were strongly recognizable as maps...

In 1939, visitors stood in line for hours to see the Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair, a detailed model imagining 1960s America. Complete with half a million tiny buildings and a million handmade miniature trees, it also visualized a network of highways crossing the country. And while the interstate system probably would have been built without it, it's arguable that the visualization—sponsored by GM—helped the roads happen.

"Visualizations of future cities contribute to our collective imagination," says Nick Dunn from Lancaster University "They provide us with visionary projections of how we might live. Reexamining these from a historical perspective can give us new insights and greater understanding of the developments and patterns that shape the present, and in turn, their implications for our future."

Attendees to a recent fundraising event inside University of Cambridge’s 16th-century chapel were treated to a spectacular display far above. The Gothic arches of King’s College Chapel were transformed into a canvas for mesmerizing views of stars, foliage, psychedelic clouds and university crests. The work was created by French projection artist Miguel Chevalier.

The visuals were generated in real-time, contributing to the theme of each speaker. During a presentation on black holes by Stephen Hawking, the room was transformed into a vision of deep space. Other topics touched on subjects ranging from health, to Africa, biology and physics.

Built with almost no regard for the hills that dominate its landscape, San Francisco’s grid like street layout and near vertical roads are unique in the world of cities. The “City by the Bay” really started growing after the California gold rush started booming in the late 1840’s, so by the time the gorgeous map featured here was made in 1912, the city looked remarkably like it does today. What was missing were many of the attractions the city is now best known for: noticeably absent is Pier 39 and the very crooked section of Lombard Street. Also yet to be built: the Golden Gate Bridge...

In our Data Visualization 101 series, we cover each chart type to help you sharpen your data visualization skills.Scatter plots have been called the “most versatile, polymorphic, and generally useful invention in the history of statistical graphics” (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2005).

That’s a big claim, but just as their name implies, they can take a confusing and scattered set of data and make sense of it. As such, these plots are much more than a visualization tool; they are a discovery tool. Let’s look at what makes the scatter plot so good...

A quick history of graphing information and how scatter plots are unique from other ways of graphing in more than one way. A great visual of the different types of relationships that are easily identified on a scatter plot, highlighting why scatter plots are so useful to understand relationships between two different variables.

Graphics director Alberto Lucas Lopéz has created the following infographic for South China Morning Post, depicting languages as populations.

Based on data from language research project Ethnologue, the infographic shows 23 out of more than 7,000 languages in the world as there are at least 50 million individuals who use these 23 languages as their first language.

Ever wonder how many meteors have hit Earth? The Meteoritical Society is doing its best to keep track. And Javier de la Torre, co-founder of CartoDB, is helping us see the pure volume of hits (into the tens of thousands). His interactive visualization shows a heatmap of hits all over the world, letting you explore where and when meteorites fell, as well as their size and classification.

The USGS is on a open-access roll with topoView, an advanced new map-finding tool.

The cartography arm of the U.S. Geological Survey has been on an open-access roll. First they send their constantly updating stream of satellite imagery to what's basically a public dropbox, so that anyone can use Landsat-8 photographs for free. And now they're introducing topoView, an online archival tool that makes truly accessible the agency's 178,000 topographical maps, dating from 1880 (shortly after the USGS started mapping the country) to 2010.

It's the work of a Philadelphia-based data scientist who, a year ago, had never made a map.

At this time last year, Lauren Ancona had never made a map. But halfway into 2014, with help from from the free and open source mapping community and Code for America, she successfully created her first map of Philadelphia parking districts.

The parking map got a lot of attention and landed Ancona a job with the city's Office of Innovation and Technology as a data scientist. Now she's back with a beautiful blueprint-style world map made using Mapbox Studio.

Temple University researchers recently put together the world's largest tree of life visualized across time. The family tree of living and extinct organisms encompasses 50,000 species—only a fraction of the world's history of life—and would easily take up hundreds of pages if laid out linearly. To fit their work onto a printed page, the researchers, led by evolutionary biologist S. Blair Hedges, instead decided to visualize the data as a spiral.

Digitizing Brazil’s most important monument is no small feat. Located atop the 700 meter Corcovado Mountain the Christ the Redeemer statue towers over Rio de Janeiro, at 38 meters of height and with a 28 meter arm span. Traditional 3D scanning technologies are unuseable due to the size and location of the statue, the difficult accessibility and challenging weather conditions.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.